My experiences as an IT professional - Anything that I write here is my personal opinion and should not be officially associated with any other entity

4 posts from May 2012

Friday, May 25, 2012

I wanted to add ads on each post of my blog here (that's apparently the best place for them) so looked for info on how to do it and came across this Typepad help page http://help.typepad.com/add_content_between_posts.html where it states "To place ads within posts without using Advanced Templates, you can use FeedBurner's FeedFlares feature to place Google AdSense ads within the post footer. Plus, Unlimited, Premium, and Business Class accounts have the ability to add FeedFlares to their blog. More information on setting up FeedFlares is available in the connecting to FeedBurner article."

I followed the thread and set everything up as Typepad, Google AdSense and Feedburner recommended. I saw that ads were now getting pumped to my feed, but not to my blog and it didn't matter what I did.

Members of the AdSense community help forum were very unhelpful and even a bit rude. I was hoping that a Google employee could verify if the functionality was still available or not and didn't get any such support.

I opened a support ticket with Typepad and they let me know that the links that I had used were probably out of date and that feature was likely no longer available.

So there you have it. If you have a Pro Basic Typepad account like I do, it's not currently possible for you to have ads on each blog post.

Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Instructions on how to set up Linux modules needed to get a LogAnalyzer log aggregation/analysis server up and running and collecting logs.

Prerequisites

These instructions are specific to CentOS 6.2. If you are using a different distro, many of the installation commands and paths to files will be different from what I've documented below. I strongly suggest that you document the steps to perform a similar install for your distro.

You will need to install the prerequisites by using the following commands:

The '/usr/bin/updatedb' command updates the file index so that the 'find' and 'locate' commands work properly. If you've already properly set up your system to index the files daily, this will be unnecessary.

If your distro of Linux is using a different syslog server such as syslog-ng or sysklogd, you'll need to remove it.

MySQL

Set up MySQL

Hit enter key after last command has run since no password has yet been set for root MySQL account. Hit 'y' and enter when asked to set up a root password and type in a strong password. Hit 'y' and enter for the following questions: "Remove anonymous users?", "Disallow root login remotely?", "Remove test database and access to it?", and "Reload privilege tables now?"

Just above ### begin forwarding rule ### section add info similar to the following line to limit IP addresses that can send syslog info to the server, for each class C subnet the server will be collecting from, you'll need to enter the subnet info followed by /24 (such as 172.18.22.0/24) to allow that subnet to send syslog data. Alternatively, you can limit by single IP addresses. The 127.0.0.1 is necessary so the server can send logs to itself: